Wings of Omen - Thieves World 06 (18 page)

Ischade blinked again, just once, that very conscious gesture. Harran swallowed and kept going. "The Ilsigi gods have started believing in time, lady. The worship of mortals has bound them into it. Sacrifices at noon, savory smokes going up at sunset, the Ten-Slaying once a year-every festival that happens at a regular interval, every scheduled thing-has bound them. Gods may have made eternity, but mortals made clocks and calendars and tied little pieces of eternity up with them. Mortals have bound the gods! Rankan and Ilsigi both. But mortals can also free them." He took a long breath. "If they've lost timelessness-then this spell can find it for Them again. For at least one of them, who can open the way for the others. And once the Ilsig gods are wholly free of our world-"

"-They will drive out the Rankan gods, and the Beysib goddess too, and take back their own again?..." Ischade smiled-slow cool derision-but there was interest behind it. "Mighty work, that, for a mortal. Even for one who spends so much of his time wielding those powerful sorcerer's tools, the cautery and the bone-saw. But one question, Harran. Why?"

Harran stopped. Some vague image of Ils stomping all over Savankala, of Shipri

punching Sabellia's heart out, and his own crude satisfaction at the fact, was all he had. At least, besides the image of maiden Siveni, warlike, impetuous, triumphing over her rivals-and later settling down again to the arts of peace in her restored templeAnd Ischade smiled, and sighed, and put her hood up. "No matter," she said. There was vast amusement in her voice-probably, Harran suspected, at the prospect of a man who didn't know what he wanted, and would likely die of it. Nothing confounds the great alchemies and magics so thoroughly as unclear motives. "No matter at all," Ischade said. "Should you succeed at what you intend, there'll be merry times hereabouts, indeed there will. I should enjoy watching the proceedings. And should you fail..." The slim dark shoulders lifted in the slightest shrug. "At least I know where good quality mandrake's to be had. Good evening to you, master barber. And good fortune-if there is such a thing."

She was gone. The wind got up again, and whining, ran away....

* * *

Of the greater sorceries, one of the elder priests had long ago said to Harran, in warning, "Notice is always taken." The still, dark-eyed notice that had come upon Harran in the graveyard troubled him indeed. He went home that night shivering with more than cold; and, once in bed, kicked Tyr perfunctorily out of it and pulled Mriga in-using her with something more than his usual impersonal effectiveness. No mere scratching of the itch tonight. He was looking, hopelessly, for something more-some flicker of feeling, some returning pressure of arms. But the lousiest Downwind whore would have suited his purposes a hundred times better than the mindless, compliant warmth that lay untroubled under him or which jerkily, aimlessly wound its limbs about his. Afterward Harran pushed her out too, leaving Mriga to crawl to the hearth and curl in the ashes while he tossed and turned. For all the sleep he found in bed, Harran might as well have been lying in ashes himself, or embers. Ischade.... No good could come of her attention. Who knew if, for her own amusement, she might not sell to some interested party-Molin Torchholder, say the information that one lone, undefended man was going to bring back one of the old Ilsig gods in a few days? "Oh, Siveni..." he whispered. He would have to move quickly, before something happened to stop him.

Tonight.

Not tonight, he thought in a kind of reluctant horror. That same horror made him stop and wonder, in a priest's self-examination, about its source. Was it just the familiar repulsion he always felt at the thought of the old ruin on the Avenue of Temples? Or was it something else?

-A shadow on the edge of his mind's vision, a feeling that something was about to go wrong. Someone. Someone who had been watching himRaik?

All the more reason for it to be tonight, then. He was sure he had seen Raik staggering into the barracks-probably to snore off another night of wineshops. Harran had thought to go back twice to the temple-once to retrieve the old roll book, and then, after studying it, once to perform the rite. But even that would be attracting too much attention. It would have to be tonight. Harran lay there, postponing getting up into the cold for just a few seconds more. Since that day five years ago when the Rankans served the writ on Irik, he had not been inside Siveni's temple. For so long now I've been done with temples. Going into one, now-and hers-do I truly want to reopen that old wound?

He stared at the skinny, twitching shape curled up in the ashes, and wondered.

"Every temple needs an idiot," the old master-priest had once said to Harran in creaky jest. Harran had laughed and agreed with him, being just then in the middle of an unmasterable lesson, and feeling himself idiot enough for any twelve temples. Now-in exile-Harran briefly wondered whether he was still living in a temple; whether he had accepted the idiot because she was so like the mad and poor who had frequented Siveni's fane in the days when there was still wisdom dispensed there, and healing, and food. Of wisdom and healing he had little enough. And Mriga never complained about the food. Or anything else....

He swore softly, got up, got dressed. There, in the wooden box shoved under his sideboard, were the bones of the hand, wired and mounted into the correct gesture, with the ring of base metal on the proper finger; there was the mandrake, hastily bound in cord twisted of silk and lead, with a silvered steel pin through its "body" to hold it harmless. Both hairpin and ring had come from a secondhand whore that Yuri had recently brought home for the barracks. Harran, last in line and mildly concerned that the woman might notice when her things went missing, had "considerately" brought her a stoup of drugged wine. Then he swived her until the wine took, lifted ring and pin, and slipped away-first leaving her a largish tip where no one but she would be likely to find it. So-almost set. He picked up the box, went over to the comer by the table for a few more things-a small flask, a little bag of grain, and another of salt, a lump of bitumen. Then he checked around one last time. Mriga lay snoring in the ashes. Tyr was curled nose-to-tail in a compact brown package under the bed, snoring too, a note higher than Mriga. Harran mussed the meager bedclothes and lumpy bolster more or less into a body shape, snatched up and flung over him his old soot-black cloak, and made his way silently through the Stepsons'

stableyard.

There was a way over the wall by the comer of the third stall down. Up the shingles, a one-handed grip on a drainpipe, a few moments scrambling to find footholds on old bricks that stuck out just so. Then up to the wall's top, and the hard drop down on the other side. Breathing hard, just before that drop, Harran paused, looking back the way he'd come-and just barely saw the vague shape by the barracks door, standing motionless.

Harran froze. The night was moonless; the torches by the door were burned down to blue. There was nothing to see but the faint flash of eyes catching that light sidewise for a second as the shadow crouched and moved into deeper shadow, and was lost.

Harran jumped, held still only long enough to get his breath, and ran. If he got to the temple in time to do what he intended, no number of pursuers would matter; the whole Rankan Empire, and the Beysibs too, would flee before what would follow.

If he had time....

The Temple of Siveni Grey-Eyes was the second-to-last one at the shabby southern end of the Avenue of Temples. At least, it was shabby now. There had been a time when Siveni's temple had had respectable neighbors: on one side, the fane and priests of Anen Wineface, the harvest-god, master of vine and corn; on the other, that of Anen's associate Dene Blackrobe, the somber mistress of sleep and death. Between them, Anen's polished sandstone and Dene's dark granite, Siveni's temple had risen in its white and gold. There had been a certain rightness to the way they stood together. Work and Wine and Sleep; and Siveni's temple, as was appropriate for a craft-goddess, had looked out over that guilds' quarter. Businessmen made deals on its broad steps, paid a coin or two to buy luck and a cake for Siveni's ravens, then went next door to Anen's to seal their deals with poured libations. Small ones; Anen's wine was generally considered too good to waste on the floor.

Those days were all done now. Anen's temple was dark except for one red light over the altar; his priests' annuity was reduced to almost nothing, and Anen's old patrons, knowing Him out of favor, tended to do their libation-pouring elsewhere. As for Dene's temple, the Rankans, possibly considering Her too contemplative (or too unimportant) to do anything about it, had demolished the building... leaving the merchants and guildsmen to quarrel over the newly available parcel of real estate.

And as for Siveni's temple... Harran stood across from it now, hiding himself in the shallow doorway of a night-shuttered mercantile establishment. He could have wept. Those white columns all smeared with city grime, the white steps leading up to the portico broken, littered, stained.... A slow cold wind swept down the Avenue of Temples toward Ils's fane, a dim shape no more clearly seen than the moon behind clouds. Near it reared up Savankala's upstart temple, and Vashanka's hard by it-both great ungainly piles, and as dark tonight as Ils's. No one walked the street. It was far past the hour for devotions. Harran held still in that doorway for a long time, unable to shake the feeling that he had been followed. The gongs of Ils's temple rang the third hour after midnight. The sound wavered in the wind like Harran's heart, blowing away down the avenue toward the Governor's Palace and the estates. Something flapped nearby-a sound like a flag snapping in the wind. He jerked around, looked. Nothing but the shadowy shape of a bird on the right, flying heavily in the crosswind, coming to perch on the high cupola of Siveni's temple, becoming another shadow that loomed there among the carvings. A black bird, bigger than a crow....

He unswallowed his courage, looked both ways, and hurried across the street. The strength of the wind, as Harran reached the middle of the avenue, was ominous. If ever there was a night to be home in bed, this was it.... He dashed up the stairs where he had lingered so many times before, tripping now and again over some dislodged stone, some crack that hadn't been there when he was young. On the portico he paused to get his breath and look back the way he had come. Nothing coming, no one passing in the street.... And there, the motion again, something dark; not in the street, but next door in the cloddy, vacant lot that was all that remained of Dene's temple. Harran felt under his cloak for the long knife....

Eyes caught the reflection of the pale stone of Siveni's stairs. Harran found himself looking at the largest rat he had ever seen, in Sanctuary or elsewhere. It was the size of a dog, at least. The thought of Tyr catching up with it made him shudder. As if sensing Harran's fear, the rat turned about and waddled back into the vacant lot, going about its nightly business. Other shadows, just as large, stirred about the pillars of the portico, unconcerned. Harran swallowed and thought about business. If I feel I'm being followed, the thing to do is start the spell-draw the outer circle. No one can get through it once it's closed. He put down the box and the flask and fumbled about his clothes for the lump of bitumen. Slowly he made his way around the great open square of pillars, all of which bore the sledgehammer marks of attempted demolition. The marks were futile, of course-any temple built by the priests of the goddess who invented architecture might be expected to last-but they scarred Harran's heart just looking at them. Right around the portico, as he'd been taught-four hundred eighty paces exactly-Harran went, bent over, his back aching. Dark shapes fled again and again at his passing. He refused to look at them. By the time he came around to the middle of the stairs again and drew the diagram-knot that tied the circle closed, his back was one long creaking bar of iron with smiths working on it; but he felt much safer. He picked up his box again and made his way inward.

The great doors within the portico were long since barred shut from inside, but that would hardly stop anyone who had served Siveni past the novitiate. Harran traced the door's carved raven-and-olive-tree motif just below eye level until he found the fourth raven past the second tree with no olives on it, and pushed in the raven's eye. The bird's whole head fell in after it, revealing the little catch and valve that opened the priests' door. The catch was stiff, but after a couple of tries the door swung open wide enough to admit Harran. He slipped in and swung it silently to behind him.

Harran lifted the dark lantern he had brought with him and unshuttered it. And then he did begin to weep; for the statue was gone-the image toward which Harran had once bowed affectionately so many times a day, having eventually learned to see and bow to the immortal beauty behind the mortal symbol. Siveni's great statue in her aspect as Defender, seated, armed and helmed, holding her battalion-vanquishing spear in one hand and her raven perched on the other. The great work, the statue that the artist Rahen had spent five years fashioning of marble, gold, and ivory, afterward putting down his sculptor's tools forever and saying he knew his life's masterwork when he saw it, and would make no other.... All gone. Harran could have understood it if they had stripped the gold and ivory off, pried the gems out of the mighty shield. He knew as well as any other Sanctuarite that not even nailing things down could keep them safe here. But he had never thought to have the fact brought home to him so brutally as this. The pediment on which the statue had stood was bare except for bits of rubble, chunks and splinters of shattered marble... but those were eloquent even in ruin. Here, a fat pyramidal lump was one corner of the statue's pedestal; there, a long slim shard, smooth and faintly grooved at one end, broken off sharp as a flint at the other-a feather from a raven's outstretched wing.... Harran's brain roiled with rage. Where did they-why-A whole statue, a statue thirty feet high! Stolen, destroyed, lost.